Tuesday, June 21, 2011

I've been posting about the Polish Diaspora for a while now, and what always brings me pleasure is the realization of how many fine writers and artists there are who share a Polish background.

Recently, I've met one of these writers online. His name is Piotr Gwiazda, and he came to the US from Poland in 1991. He's a reviewer, a translator, a university professor, and a poet.

His recent book Gagarin Street has the creative energy that I've seen in writers like Milosz, Szymborska, and Herbert. Gwiazda's book -- combining nostalgia and apocalyptic visions -- offers us a vision of a disappearing world folding in upon itself. It's like nothing else I've seen since William Burroughs.

You've got to take a look at Gwiazda's poems:

GAGARIN STREET

When I was a child I lived on Gagarin Street.Today it’s called Pilsudski Street. Ten years ago the sun rose, a little wind blew, a little bird sang, a little empire fifty kilometers away fell, and so did its heroes: Lenin, Dzerzhinsky,Bierut. This one, though, makes you pause for a moment after his lonely voyage in spinning Vostok after his tumble from orbit, his fifty-fifty chance of survival.After all, he was our hero—this they taught usin middle school—“our” meaning all of us, all of the world.Not so. Today his space-suit rotsin a museum basement, his Russian face with Soviet smiledisappears from history textbooks, his round-the-globe celebrity revoked (unanimously) by a municipalsubcommittee. Well, I suppose that’s how history is made or unmade. Nothing is certain till it becomes historyand then it is unmade. I’ve been carryingthis city in my pocket for so many years and today—look: a hole. What’s happened to it?Streets are renamed, monuments rededicated,old heroes buried, still older ones brought back from the dead.In place of the crumbling soccer stadium, I read in the paper yesterday, they’re building a new church. Or is it a new stadium that will replace a church? I can’t tell for sure,but this I can tell: my city doesn’t recognize me, buildings give me evasive looks, the Old Town district(did it get a face-lift?) turns its shabby back on me, the parks I loved either leased or closed, even Gagarin Street,now Pilsudski Street, pretends it’s never seen me before as I cross it, then re-cross it, trying to stir its memoryby taking pictures. Nothing helps!Granted, some things have stayed the same: Fiats,kiosks, drunks (though now the homeless seem to outnumber them), the city-hall clock still strikes twiceat one in the afternoon, and better times are as usual latefor people at the bus stop. The place itself, though, has changed. I don’t mean the surfaces, I meanthis: passing by the dreary, four-story apartment building where I once lived, I ask myself what is real and what is past and therefore imagined? For I can almost imaginethis is not my hometown at all. Suppose I’m just passing through,another happy tourist with a rented car and digital camera (these days you see droves of themin all Central Europe). Nothing connects me to this place,nothing keeps me here, nobody waits for me.After all, it’s only another foreign city and I’ve seen so many,each slightly different from what I expected.

JULY

Days were predictable, times uncertain.A heat-wave paralyzed the Eastern Seaboard,the war inched on, Dow Jones kept sliding,I had just moved to a new city. Every afternoonI would take walks by myself, learning street namesmarking buildings—I read sign boards, posters,inscriptions under statues, people’s faces(some would even ask me for directions), strolledthrough the cool halls of churches, museums, librarieswith the guilty curiosity of a student skipping school. So much time, so little money. I survived on bread and Tolstoy.In the newspapers, another suicide bombing,another corporate scandal. Meanwhile, the sun would rise above the painted harbor,Tuesday imperceptibly slip into Thursday.Such bliss. Such misery. I savored my solitude,I craved company. My pocket notebookwas filled with apocalyptic images. In the Westhalf of America was on fire.

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From Gwiazda's page at the Washington Writers' Publishing House:

Piotr Gwiazda was born in Olsztyn, Poland, in 1973 and came to the United States in 1991. His published works include Gagarin Street (WWPH, 2005) and James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, Columbia, Drunken Boat, Hotel Amerika, Margie, Rattle, The Southern Review, Talisman, and Washington Square. He has published book reviews in Chicago Review, PN Review, Postmodern Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary poetry.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Hot days the workers threw open the shop doors and the neighborhood buzzed with the rip of their saws through the seasoned planks of walnut, birch, and maple. Pine shavings piled inches deep on the floor oozed sap over the steel-toes of the aproned man who stood hours turning scrollwork while near him another burnished stacks of brass cornices and grips, and the friendliest, saddled with a sagging belt of hammers, mouth bristling with nails, tacked nameplates and sterling crucifixesto each finished box, some nearly as long as grandfather's rowboat, others barely big enough to hold sister's talking doll, and after our fathers drove off to the grind of the second shift leaving their wives leaning out windows to tend twisted lines of wash, we kids on the sidewalk slapped balls and double-dutched through the vapor-stink of curing varnish while over our heads the empty sleeves and pant legs flapped when our mothers pulley-squealed them closer through pitched beams of light already clogged with dust.

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John Bargowski was born and raised in Jersey City and now lives with his family on a small acreage along the Delaware River in the Skylands of northwestern New Jersey. He is the recipient of a 2009 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a 2000 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship, The Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest. His work has been published in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, & Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).